Mean free path of photons in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Abstract

Electromagnetic probes, such as photons and dileptons, play a key role in diagnosing the initial temperature of the hot and dense quark-gluon plasma (QGP) matter created in relativistic nuclear collisions at very high energies. This is due to their large mean free path $\lambda$, which allows them to escape the medium without significant interactions. Unlike hadronic particles, which experience multiple scatterings and are affected by the evolving medium, electromagnetic probes carry undistorted information from the initial stages of the expanding system. In this work an attempt has been made to revisit the estimation of mean free paths of photons in QGP phase for a temperature range predicted by hydrodynamics for heavy ion collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV at RHIC and $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=2.76$ TeV at the LHC. The mean free paths have been estimated for a plasma expanding via (1+1)D and (2+1)D hydrodynamical expansions. For the (1+1)D case, photons with low energy ($E_{\gamma}< 0.2$ GeV) coming from a high temperature ($>250$ MeV) source are found to have shorter mean free path compared to the expansion scale of the system; while the high energy photons have always larger mean free paths. A similar qualitative nature of the mean free path has also been observed for a more realistic (2+1)D hydrodynamic model calculations although the $\lambda$ values are found to be larger on a quantitative scale compared to the (1+1)D case.